It's past 12:30 a.m. and I'm just ready to put the computer to sleep for the night, go get some hot bread and milk and get ready for bed. I've been working on my family history today, cleaning up my database, filling in blanks, etc. Just for fun, I thought I'd have my genealogy program tell me how many cousins I have. I was really liberal, allowing half cousins and cousins removed as many times as necessary... Well, there are sixty-five pages of them!!! Who knew?? I'm printing out the first 12 pages, just those who are first, second, or third cousins. Who are these people? I'm about to find out.

Here's a photo of most of my MICHIE first cousins, my mom's side. The photo was taken at a family reunion in 1946. That's me, third girl from the right, sitting on the grass. You can see that most of the cousins are older than I. A lot of them were already married and having families of their own.

Today I went to lunch with a cousin - last chance before she and her husband go to Jerusalem for a year and a half. We had a great lunch and a great visit, and when I got home I was totally exhausted! I lay down on the couch for a "few minutes" and the next thing I knew was that it was 7:00 pm and I was just waking up. I had slept more than four hours! I hate having fibromyalgia!

Creamy in the Snow

I love cats! They are warm, soft, sometimes cuddly, often entertaining, and always independent! This is Creamy. He's a little more than a yearling, which makes him an almost-teenager in cat years. A couple of nights ago (read that 2:00 am) he wanted to go outside, and when a cat wants out, you open the door! It was snowing those big fluffy flakes that Utah is famous for, so I thought he wouldn't stay out very long. After a few minutes I opened the door again to see if Creamy wanted to come back into the house. He didn't! He was having too much fun playing in the snow!!

This is my driveway. You can see the cat tracks and odd little places where the snow has been disturbed. Creamy was jumping from place to place where he would stop for a few seconds and bat the snow around with his front paws! It was like he was looking for something, or building a 'snow-mouse' - don't know which. I had to get a photo, and this is the best one. Because it was the middle of the night, I used the flash, hence the glowing eyes and and a few snowflakes.

PS: I have a cat door, but Creamy refuses to use it. There is a story about that, but we'll save that for another day.

Second try

I started a blog once before, then bailed out, so now I'm trying again. I spend most of my time doing family history research and related work. I also enjoy landscape photography, and I have a website that features those parts of my life - had it for about 10 years now. The internet has moved on since then, and now the thing is "social networking," something a little scary for me. I like being anonymous, but we have to keep up with the times, don't we?